This piece of utter retardation just popped up on my radar; and, after a solid round of bashing my head against my keyboard, I was compelled to comment. The short version is, Chris Anderson at Wired is making the argument that the availability of enormous clouds of data will allow scientists to eschew the scientific method and just pull conclusions from correlations within “the cloud.” His main argument for this, Google doesn’t have a proper model of why PageRank works, but it does so, there you go.
Ars Technica provides a better rebuttal of the scientific points that I feel like writing; so I highly suggest that you read that. But I do have some comments I’d like to make.
To start, why, for the love of Ahura Mazda, must every Web 2.0 dork conflate Google with the rest of the gods damned universe. First, Google is an advertising company, nothing more, nothing less. The sooner you nerds realize that everything that comes out of Google Labs is directed at creating a pool of eyes to view those ads, the less disappointed you’ll be when reality comes crashing down. Second, Google’s success is a result
